How To Use Facebook's Suicide Prevention Tools If You Have A Friend In Need

Now that the program has extended internationally, it is easier to learn how to use Facebook's suicide prevention tools now more than ever. If you haven't heard of them before, Facebook's suicide prevention tools are measures put in place to help guide users who fear that their friends may be in danger of self-injury or suicide by giving them the proper channels to get help and reach out to their friend. Suicide and self-injury prevention tools have been in place for Facebook users in the U.S. with the help of with the help of Forefront, Lifeline, and Save.org, but today marks an extension of the program across the platform in every language to make it available to users worldwide.

Although any situation of this nature is a high-pressure one, Facebook's tools are comprehensive, easy to manage, entirely sensitive to both parties involved. Open 24 hours a day, Facebook helps connect users to hotlines and resources for help, and allows users to make direct reports to Facebook personnel, who appreciate the urgency of these concerns and prioritize these incidents above other Facebook help requests. Facebook shared the expansion of the program to their website on the Facebook Safety page earlier this morning.

If you are worried about yourself or another user on the site, you can go to Facebook Help's Suicide Prevention page, which will then present you with several options, depending on the situation you are in. The page will look like this:

Every one of the situations will expand into a series of options or instructions for the user.

Facebook still encourages any users who believe someone else is in danger of a direct threat of suicide to contact law enforcement or call a suicide hotline. They have listed the suicide hotlines for every country on Facebook's suicide hotline page. But even if it doesn't seem like a direct threat, never hesitate to say something — a misunderstanding on social media is a very small consequence to somebody possibly losing their life.